Judges close redistricting fight with admonition

Panel scolds GOP, suggests probes in order

Madison —Three federal judges closed out Wisconsin's redistricting litigation Monday with an order that scolded Republicans for drawing election maps in secret and hinted regulators may want to investigate why subpoenaed documents were withheld from groups that sued the state.

"We cannot help but conclude that the people of Wisconsin deserve better in the next round of redistricting after the 2020 census," the judges wrote.

Their decision ends the fight over the maps of legislative and congressional districts that Republicans drew in 2011. The dispute over the maps themselves were resolved over a year ago, but the case has lingered because of a disagreement over how many documents were not turned over to the plaintiffs that should have been.

The plaintiffs told the court last month they had reached a settlement with Michael Best & Friedrich, the law firm retained by the Legislature to help draw the maps. Details of that financial settlement have not been publicly disclosed.

The court accepted that settlement and ended the case Monday, but also pondered whether agencies such as the state Office of Lawyer Regulation or others should look into the handling of the subpoenaed documents.

"The extent to which historians, the media, professional regulators and disciplinary bodies, or any others may wish to take further action is for them to decide in due course. But the involvement of the federal judiciary in this matter has come to an end at least for this decade," the court wrote.

The judges — two of them appointed by Republican presidents and one of them appointed by a Democratic president — also criticized Republican lawmakers for using an overly secret process of drawing the maps. Legislative leaders made lawmakers sign confidentiality agreements, limited their ability to see the maps and had their staff draw them along with lawyers in Michael Best's Madison office instead of the Capitol.

"In closing, we simply re-emphasize our previous observations ... about the regrettable contentiousness that often accompanies partisan redistricting wherever it takes place and the additional Wisconsin-specific rancor brought on by the peculiarly furtive process adopted by the majority party this time around," the judges wrote.

New sets of maps are required after each census to account for population changes, and Republicans were able to draw maps in 2011 that greatly helped them because they controlled the Legislature and governor's office.

A group of Democrats and the immigrant rights group Voces de la Frontera sued over the maps and the case went to the special panel of three federal judges. They ruled last year that two Assembly districts on Milwaukee's south side violated the voting rights of Latinos.

The court tweaked those maps but left the other maps in place, leaving the GOP with the upper hand in elections.

As of January, the process of drawing the maps and fighting the lawsuit cost taxpayers nearly $1.9 million. That month, legislators hired new lawyers in the case, meaning the final cost will be higher.

About Patrick Marley

Patrick Marley covers state government and state politics. He is the author, with Journal Sentinel reporter Jason Stein, of "More Than They Bargained For: Scott Walker, Unions and the Fight for Wisconsin.”